Though many of the characters in The Missing were written to be neither completely good nor completely bad, no one was made more so than Mogens Hoyer, Ghita’s mentor, boss and surrogate parental figure.
In a really, really early concept draft, I toyed with the idea that Ghita could’ve had an affair with Mogens at some point; to make Susanne’s sudden fawning over her particularly jarring and underline Ghita’s own moral corruption. It would also, I’m sorry to say, have made for a really HILARIOUS amount of player panic, because Hoyer’s treatment of Ghita is so “fatherly” and we were always meant to speculate if Hoyer could’ve been Ghita’s real father (he was never meant to be, don't worry). Alas, in the end, I scrapped the slept-with-the-boss idea because it would have added complexity to the branching (on top of the stress of the daddy thing) and more importantly, wouldn’t have been an available option for WLW-only players. It felt unbalanced.
Anyway, in the design document, I wrote:
He views the MC as the daughter he never had and has been following her career since she came out of the academy. Due to her strained relationship with her own father, Ghita considers Hoier a parental figure and though they keep things professional, she places significant respect and trust in their relationship. He knows about her loss and encourages her to find catharsis in helping others.
I don’t know if anyone caught it, but there’s a link between something Ghita says to herself in S1 and something Hoyer said in the past. To me, it was important to show the connection between them in several layers, but also to place Hoyer on a pedestal so that his death and subsequent exposure offers no peace or validation in Ghita’s grief. Our heroine is forced to re-evaluate everything about this man that she trusted unconditionally while having the worst month personally and professionally of her life (since her mother’s disappearance). In the design document, I added:
Hoier is motivated by guilt and remorse about his past; he did selfish, bad things as a young undercover officer and he has tried to make amends. However, his past catches up with him, and he is forced into corruption once again. It is revealed that he has a secret child by a woman he met while undercover. He abandoned the woman and the child suddenly, much in the same way Ghita’s mother left. The woman succumbed to addiction while the child grew up to become the unscrupulous leader of a drug ring in Copenhagen. Fueled by hatred and revenge, the adult child sets out to destroy Hoier’s life and drags Ghita into it out of jealousy and fascination.
In the course of writing, I had several ideas for exposition scenes for Hoyer; conversations with O and O’s predecessor, him almost getting caught doing illegal stuff at work, flashbacks to him being young and doing evil things in Aalborg - but none of it felt really relevant for Ghita's story. As much as Hoyer's deeds cast long shadows into Ghita's life, he had to remain just that: A shadow.
One final thing I'd like to mention is that I wrote the conversation between Hoyer and O as if O knew he was their father while Hoyer was unaware. I think that's what O would want; Hoyer wondering as he was dying, 'why?'. He had known for a while that something was wrong but he could never pinpoint what. I don't think he even suspected that O was his kid. Perhaps they whispered it in his ear in the seconds before his death. So they could look each other in the eye one last time as father and son/daughter. That would have been dramatic AF and O is nothing if not ✨the drama✨.
Do you have questions? Leave them in the comments or submit an ask!
